Final Essay Proposal: 5% of final grade

Due

  • Friday, April 19 by the end of the day

Requirements

Please see the final essay assignment page for a description of the final essay requirements.

Your proposal should include:

  • 1-2 sentence central research question. As with your historical context essay, your central research question should name the text(s) you will be writing about as well as the specific historical event, document, concept, policy and/or figure – the “historical context” – you will be discussing in your essay. If you are expanding on your historical context essay in writing your final essay, this central research question can be similar to the question you answered in your historical context essay, though it should not be exactly the same. It should represent an expansion, revision, or reworking of that question.
  • 1-2 paragraph abstract of your essay that clearly articulates your topic, the text(s) you will write about, and what you think (at this point) your argument in your final essay will be.
  • Citations of and links to the historical source(s) you will incorporate into your essay (or that you think you may incorporate into your essay). If your historical source(s) is not available online but is available via the library, please include links to information about this source in the library catalog.
  • Citations of and links to at least 3 scholarly articles or book chapters, at least two of which were published in the past ~25 years, about your literary text(s). If these sources include single-author academic books, please indicate for each book which specific chapter(s) you have/will read for your essay. Please make sure to include links to each scholarly source (either to the record in the library catalog or to the journal article or book itself).

Formulating Your Central Research Question and Writing Your Abstract

Please see the historical context essay page for more information about formulating your central research question for this essay.

Your abstract should describe the topic of your final essay, it should name the text(s) you will be writing about, and it should articulate, as clearly as possible, what you think your argument (at this point) will be. Your argument will most likely change as you learn more about your topic and start writing. This is expected; your abstract represents a preliminary attempt to articulate your argument. You can change your mind.

You may find this resource from The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison useful when writing your abstract: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/assignments/writing-an-abstract-for-your-research-paper/. Not all of the criteria listed under “The Contents of an Abstract” section will apply for this assignment, but you might find the sample humanities abstract they provide on this page (“Sample Abstract 2”) helpful as you write your own.

Conducting Research

Fred Muratori from Cornell University Library has prepared a library research guide for our class, which you can find here: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/english3630lt. This guide includes a wealth of information about how to find primary and secondary sources relevant to your research question, including information about databases that might be useful for learning about relevant primary sources, including still and moving images, as well as how to find secondary sources such as scholarly books and articles.

Please note that this essay, unlike your historical context essay, requires you to include secondary scholarship or criticism about the text(s) you are writing about. I ask you to cite a minimum of 3 secondary sources as part of this proposal.